THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE

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CHAPTER VII. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE RACE

I

The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations. It is a relation which almost amounts to identity. Yet it somehow seems so vague, so abstract, as scarcely to concern us at all. It is only lately indeed that there has been formulated even so much as a science to discuss this relationship, and the duties which, when properly understood, it throws upon the individual. Even yet the word "Eugenics," the name of this science, and this art, sometimes arouses a smile. It seems to stand for a modern fad, which the superior person, or even the ordinary plebeian democrat, may pass by on the other side with his nose raised towards the sky. Modern the science and art of Eugenics certainly seem, though the term is ancient, and the Greeks of classic days, as well as their successors to-day, used the word Eugeneia for nobility or good birth. It was chosen by Francis Galton, less than fifty years ago, to express "the effort of Man to improve his own  We pride ourselves, rightly or wrongly, on our care for the individual; during all the past century we claim to have been strenuously working for an amelioration of the environment which will make life healthier and pleasanter for the individual. But in the concentration of our attention on this altogether desirable end, which we are still far from having adequately attained, we have lost sight of that larger end, the well-being of the race and the amelioration of life itself, not merely of the conditions of life. The most we hope is that somehow the improvement of the conditions of the individual will incidentally improve the stock. These our practical ideals, which have flourished for a century past, arose out of the great French Revolution and were inspired by the maxim of that Revolution, as formulated by Rousseau, that "All men are born equal." That But this statement must not be left without important qualification. Thus the ancient Greeks (as Moïssidès has shown in Janus, 1913), not only their philosophers and statesmen, but also their women, often took the most enlightened interest in eugenics, and, moreover, showed it in practice. They were in many respects far in advance of us. They clearly realised, for instance, the need of a proper interval between conceptions, not only to ensure the health of women, but also the vigour of the offspring. It is natural that among every fine race eugenics should be almost an instinct or they would cease to be a fine race. It is equally natural that among our modern degenerates eugenics is an unspeakable horror, however much, as the psycho-analysts would put it, they rationalise that horror.

The way out of this clash of ideals—which has compelled us to hope impossibilities from the environment because we dreaded what seemed the only alternative—is, as we know, furnished by birth-control. An unqualified reliance on the environment, making it ever easier and easier for the feeblest and most defective to be born and survive, could only, in the long run, lead to the degeneration of the whole race. The knowledge of the practice of birth-control gives us the mastery of all that the ancients gained by infanticide, while yet enabling us to cherish that ideal of the sacredness of human life which we profess to honour so highly. The main difficulty is that it demands a degree of scientific precision which the ancients could not possess and might dispense with, so long as they were able to decide the eugenic claims of the infant by actual inspection. We have to be content to determine not what the infant is but when it be likely to be, and  biology is altogether against the narrow Individualism which seeks to oppose Collective Individualism. For if, in accordance with the most careful modern investigations, we recognise that heredity is supreme, that the qualities we have inherited from our ancestors count for more in our lives than anything we have acquired by our own personal efforts, then we have to admit that the capable man's wealth is more the community's property than his own, and, similarly, the incapable man's poverty is more the community's concern than his own. So that neither the capable nor the incapable are entitled to an unqualified power of freedom, and neither, likewise, are justly liable to be burdened by an unqualified responsibility. It is the duty of the community to F.H. Perrycoste, "Politics and Science," Science Progress, Jan., 1920.

But it is the same with Socialism, or by whatever name we chose to call the Collectivist activities of the community in social reform. Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments. It is the more necessary to point this out since it is on the Socialist and Democratic side, much more frequently than on the Individualist side, that we find an indifferent or positively hostile attitude towards eugenic considerations. Put  After setting forth the present conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies. The frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that many evils thoughtlessly attributed to inferiority of stock are really due to bad environment. But when the environment has been so far improved that all defects due to its badness are removed,  Ability to earn the minimum wage, Eden Paul argues in agreement with H.G. Wells, must be the condition of the right to become a parent. "Unless the socialist is a eugenist as well, the socialist state will speedily perish from racial degradation."

In an essay on "Eugenics, Birth Control, and Socialism" in Population and Birth-Control: A Symposium, edited by Eden and Cedar Paul.

This is here and there beginning to be recognised. Thus, not long ago, the Hereford War Pensions Committee resolved not to issue a maternal grant for children born during a prolonged period of treatment allowance. Such a measure of course fails to meet the situation, for it is obvious that, when born, the children must be cared for. But it shows a glimmering recognition of the facts, and the people capable of such a recognition will, in time, come to see that the right way of meeting the situation is, not to neglect the children, but to prevent their conception. Mothers' Clinics for instruction in such prevention are now being established in England, through the advocacy of Mrs. Margaret Sanger and the actual initiative of Dr. Marie Stopes.

 Such a recognition, such an aspiration, indicates that a new hope is dawning on the world's horizon, and a higher ideal growing within the human soul. The mad competition of the industrial world during the past century, with the sordid gloom and wretchedness of it for all who were able to see beneath the surface, has shown for This has long been recognised by men of science. Even anyone with the slightest knowledge of biology, Professor Bateson remarked in a British Association Presidential address in 1914, is aware that a population need not be declining because it is not increasing; "in normal stable conditions population is stationary." Major Leonard Darwin, the thoughtful and cautious President of the Eugenics Education Society, has lately stated his considered belief ("Population and Civilisation," Economic Journal, June, 1921) that increase in numbers means, ultimately, relative reduction of wealth per head, with consequent lowering of the standard of civilisation; that it also, under existing conditions, involves the production of a smaller proportion of men of ability; and, further, a depreciation of our traditions; he concludes that, whatever element in civilisation we regard—wealth, or stock, or traditions—"any increase in the population such as that now taking place will be accompanied by a lowering in the standard of our civilisation."

There are definite reasons why real progress in the supreme tasks of civilisation can best be made by a more or less stationary population, whether the population is large or small, and it need scarcely be added that, so far as the history of mankind is yet legible, the great advances in 

See, for instance, H.F. Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life, 1918, Chapter III.

To-day, we are often told, the majority of human beings belong either to the Undesired Class or the Undesirable Class. To realise that this is so, we are bidden to read the newspapers or to walk along the streets of the cities—whichever they may be—wherein dwell the highest products of our civilisation. In the better class quarters it is indeed the Undesirable Class that seems to predominate, and in the poor quarters, the Undesired. Yet, viewing our species as a whole, the two classes may be seen to walk hand in hand along the same road, and in proportion as our nobler instincts germinate and develop, we must doubtless admit that it ought to be our active aim to make that road for both of them—socially though not individually—the Road to Destruction.

To stem the devastating tide of human procreativeness, however, easy as it may seem in theory, is by no means so easy as some think, especially as those think who believe that the human race stands on the brink of suicide. For there is this about it that we must never forget: the majority of those born to-day die before their time, so that by diminishing the production of  In simpler words, populations tend to become too large for their territories, so that war ensues, and birth-control can do nothing because "it is doubtful whether a group in the plenitude of vigour and self-consciousness can 

B.A.G. Fuller, "The Mechanical Basis of War," Hibbert Journal, 1921.

Sir Shirley Murphy some years ago (Lancet, 10 Aug. 1912) argued that the fall of the birth-rate, as also that of the death-rate, has been largely effected by natural causes, independent of man's action. Mr. G. Udney Yule (The Fall in the Birth-rate, 1920) also believes that birth-control counts for little, the chief factor being natural fluctuations, probably of economic nature. Recently Mr. C.E. Pell, in his book, The Law of Births and Deaths (1921), has made a more elaborate and systematic attempt to show that the rise and fall of the birth-rate has hitherto been independent of human effort.

These two opposing councils of despair, each proclaiming, though in a contrary sense, the vanity of human wishes in the matter of procreation, might well, some may think, be left to neutralise each other and evaporate in air. But it seems worth while to point out that, with proper limitations and qualifications, there is an element of truth in each of them, while, without such limitations and qualifications, both are alike obviously absurd and wrong-headed. Undoubtedly, as the one school holds, in certain stages of civilisa Similarly, with regard to the opposing school, we must undoubtedly accept a natural fall in the birth-rate with a rising civilisation; that has always been visible in highly civilised individual couples, and it is an easily ascertainable zoological fact that throughout the evolution of life procreativeness has decreased with the increased development of species. We may agree that a natural factor comes into the recent fall in the human birth-rate. But to argue that because a natural decline in birth-rate is the essential factor in the slowing down of procreative  and so ruinous a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most of the energy which might otherwise have been available for The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an artificial product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States, just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military and Imperialistic caste.

See especially Mathorez, Histoire de la Formation de la Population Française, Vol. I, 1920, Les Étrangers en France. The fecundity of French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris. But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war, emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9 and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages. Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.

Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.

Along this road, as along any other road, we  To many of our Undesirables it may seem, mere sentiment to trouble about the ravishing of the  Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines. But, as the largest part of history shows, there is no need whatever for man to become the slave of machinery, or even for machinery to injure the quality of his own work; rightly used it may improve it. The greatest task before civilisation at present is to make machines what they ought to be, the slaves, instead of the masters of men; and if civilisation fails at the task, then without doubt it and its makers will go down to a common destruction. It is a task inextricably bound up with the task of moulding the human race for which birth-control is the elected instrument. Indeed they are but two aspects of the same task. We have to accept the rugged fact that every step to render more Professor E.M. East, a distinguished biologist and lately President of the American Society of Naturalists (Nature, 23 Sept., 1920), has estimated that, for all the fall in the birth-rate, the present rate of increase in the population of the world, chiefly of whites, who are increasing most rapidly, will, in the lives of our grandchildren, lead to a struggle for existence more terrible than imagination can conceive.

This has been set forth with admirable lucidity and wealth of illustration by Dr. Austin Freeman in his Social Decay and Regeneration (1921), already mentioned.

The vistas that are opened up when we realise the direction in which the human race is travelling may seem to be endless; and so in a sense they are. Man has replaced the gods he once dreamed of; he has found that he is himself a god, who, however realistic he seeks to make his philosophy, himself created the world as he sees it and now has even acquired the power of creat

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